Then he turned and looked the other way, and there it was. Less than a yojana away, rising from the ground in a bouquet of pristine white spires and towers and vaulting arches, more beautiful than anything he had ever imagined. The complete antithesis of the nightmarish hell-land he had been raised to expect.
The city of Lanka.
***
Supanakha watched the vanar leap from the ash tree and land with an impact that left the imprints of his bare feet permanently embedded in the grassy knoll. He ran through the picturesque pathways of the royal botanical gardens, moving quickly and discreetly. The image turned and altered, the molecules of water spinning and changing place and colour to follow him as he made his way towards Lanka. She crept around the bowl, still keeping her distance from the holy water, snarling silently at the intruder’s image.
The image collapsed abruptly, the water splashing back into the vessel. Supanakha leaped back to avoid a few droplets that splashed her way.
‘You did that deliberately.’
Ravana grinned at her. ‘There is work to be done, cousin. I have to go speak to the prisoner. I am sure you will find something with which to occupy yourself.’
‘But what of the vanar?’
Ravana’s heads were already distracted, turning away. ‘What of him?’
‘He is in Lanka! He intends to rescue the mortal. Won’t you stop him?’
Ravana laughed. ‘Do you expect me, king of rakshasas, Lakshaman Lanka, to belittle myself by wrestling a mere messenger? A vanar, at that?’
‘But you saw what he can do. How he dealt with Mainika and then Sarasa. He’s no ordinary messenger.’ She licked her chops. ‘He seems to be gifted with great powers.’
Ravana’s heads examined her shrewdly. ‘Why don’t you deal with him?’
She feigned surprise. ‘Me? Why me?’
‘Sometimes, guile can triumph where brute force fails. As you just pointed out, he appears to be gifted with great abilities. It would be a waste of resources pitting one of my champions against him. Oh, I’m sure they would defeat him eventually, but it might be more interesting to see how your gift fares against his gifts.’
‘My gift?’
‘Seduction, cousin dear. Coupled with your ability to transform your appearance. I’m sure that you could find a form that would be attractive enough to stop even a vanar as resolute as he dead in his tracks.’
She allowed herself a catty smile. She loved praise. ‘I suppose I could think of something.’
‘And if my knowledge of vanars serves me well, they are a female-dominated species. It is the woman who initiates fornication, and the male invariably complies. For the sake of
the perpetuation of the species, of course.’
‘Of course,’ she purred.
‘So if you were to use your seductive skills effectively enough, you might be able to succeed where a dozen of my best fighters might not.’
‘Might?’ She snarled in protest. Softly.
‘You certainly will succeed. Because all I need is one more night. Before sunrise tomorrow, the last die will be cast. And then Rama can send a thousand champions like that one, each capable of expanding himself to the size of the moon and the sun, and it will be of no avail. The most important battle will be won by me.’
Supanakha inclined her head, gazing curiously at the rakshasa lord. ‘What battle?’
‘Nothing that concerns you. You wished to toy with the vanar. You have your wish. If you play your part well, you will spend a very enjoyable night, with a partner far more enjoyable than you’ve had for a long while, I’ll wager.’
‘Surely,’ she said. ‘But I’m curious too. The mortal woman has already been condemned. She is to be executed at midnight tonight, in full view of all Lanka. If the excitement I smelled in this sabha hall was any indication, then you can expect every one of your law-abiding, tax-paying, flesh-eating citizens to be present in the city square to witness her execution. I hope you don’t intend to disappoint them?’
He spread his arms in mock protest. ‘How could I? You heard the council’s decision. Lanka has voted that she be put to death. Who am I to alter that democratic writ?’
‘Only the king of Lanka,’ she said. ‘And a tyrant so terrible the devas named him Ra-van-a. He Who Makes The Universe Scream.’
He wagged a finger at her. ‘You misjudge me sorely. That appellation is offensive. I am no longer that person. Besides, those cruel times called for cruel measures. If every one of us were to be called by the names our enemies chose for us, we would all have very ugly names indeed.’
‘Ah.’ She chuckled throatily. ‘You have something very naughty planned, I’m sure of it. I can’t guess what it might be. But I know you, cousin dearest. You will find a way to have the mortal woman for your own, won’t you? I saw the light in your eyes when you came to speak with her. Never before had I seen you act so … gentlemanly. Why, you seemed almost human! But even that brilliant performance couldn’t disguise your lust for her. You want her, don’t you? And you want to win her over by talk and emotional bonding, the way foolish mortals do. Not the rakshasa or gandharva way, the natural way. That was why you have been treating her so kindly, so respectfully.’ She flicked her tail sharply, like a whip cracking. ‘What do you think, cousin? If you win her over by sweet words and emotional blackmail, it will be more honourable than simply ravishing her outright? Is deceptive seduction more respectable than rape? Is that why you manoeuvred the prisoner into that moral cul- de-sac, pinning a false charge of murder upon her? So you could make her more vulnerable to your seductive wiles?’ She chuckled softly, flicking her tail again, brushing the tip against his foot, tantalisingly, teasingly. ‘You know, I don’t think you’ve changed much at all. Not at heart, where it matters anyway. You’re still the same old Ravana. Except you wield a sweet candystick instead of a chopping axe. And sweeter words where you would have used poisoned arrows before.’
An impatient flicker rippled across Ravana’s rack of faces. ‘Enough banter, cousin. It’s been entertaining listening to your theories. Do you intend to stay talking all night or do you still wish to intercept the intruder?’
She feigned a thoughtful expression. ‘I suppose as long as I’m still in the king’s favour, I ought to make the best use of it.’
One of the heads grimaced. ‘One of these days, it might be instructive to remind you of your place. But let us not waste any more time on this foolish talk. If you still wish to dally with the vanar tonight, it would be well to seduce him before he enters the city. You will have to move quickly if you are to do that.’
He turned to go, gesturing casually to open a portal before him. Through it, she could see the foliage and shrubbery of the forest level of the tower. He moved to step through the portal, then paused and turned a head back.
‘Remember, all I need is for you to keep him occupied until daybreak. After that, you may do with him as you please.’
Without waiting for her answer, he stepped through and the portal winked shut behind him.
She purred in anticipation. ‘I will, cousin, I will do with him exactly as I please … ’
FIVE
It was a city of gold. So beautiful, so perfect, he could not imagine any other existed to rival it. If a group of apsaras had appeared, greeted and garlanded him, and told him this was Vaikunta, the city-home of Lord Vishnu himself, he would not have doubted them. Or Amravati, the capital city of the devas, eternally resplendent. Indraloka perhaps, seat of power of Indra, lord of the devas. Or even Swargaloka itself, the most superior level of heaven.
But instead, this was Lanka … Lanka! City of demons and adharma. Home of all ugliness and immorality. A vile and fetid place of blood and vomit and offal … The list of clichés rolled off so easily, the cumulative residue of a thousand treetop talks and grandma’s tales. Foothold of the demon races on the mortal realm, land of death and darkness, kingdom of terror.
And yet the reality lay sprawled before him. Golden. Glea
ming. Pristine.
Beautiful.
Lanka.
He was perched on the top of a great wall, some hundred yards high, that bordered the city limits. No doubt the wall was provided for defence, but there were no guards visible for miles in either direction. Even the enormous golden gates were open, as if inviting the world itself to enter and be welcome. So much for Lanka’s formidable defenses and hostility to strangers.
It had taken him only a single leap to bound to the top, but the wall itself had given him pause for long moments. He glanced down doubtfully now, at the broad yards-thick rampart gleaming in the dusky light of the setting sun and reconfirmed what he had seen when he first approached it. The entire surface of the wall was plated with beaten gold, welded so perfectly that he could not discern a seam or joint; it was inlaid with an exquisite pattern into which precious stones had been embedded. He raised his head and looked one way, then the other, sniffing in incredulity. For miles upon miles the wall extended in both directions, a hundred yards tall and five yards wide, stretching around the base of the great mountain upon which the city was built, circling its enormous periphery. And every square inch of it was plated with solid gold and inlaid with those gems. He had not known so much gold and treasure existed in the world, nor that rakshasa skill could craft such perfection. He had licked the gold, not believing it was real. It was. The stones were real too: pearls of many colours, and lapis lazuli, onyx, diamonds of every known hue and several unknown or unimagined. What defensive wall was covered with ornamentation enough to fill the coffers of a dozen kingdoms? What citizenry, however happy and content, could pass such a gaudy display of wealth without being tempted at least once to pry loose a diamond, or even a lapis? And yet, not a gem was missing, not one gold plate out of place.
On both sides of the great wall were gardens more beautiful than the ones in the tales he had heard about the heavenly realms. He had already passed through the outer gardens to reach the wall, and they were exquisite in their immaculate perfection. The inner gardens extended for many miles, acre upon acre of undulating beauty. Meticulously landscaped walkways and lotus ponds, trees and flower fields. Several miles on, the land rose steadily upward, racing to meet its destination. The beautiful tree-lined marg that passed through the golden gates rose too, undulating in gentle, chariot-easy curves to enter an unwalled city. And that city was built in a spiralling series of layers around an impossibly tall, white tower, whose peak reached up so high beyond the red-tinged clouds of sunset that he could not see the top.
The rising layers of the city, built upon the mountainside, were easily accessible to his enhanced vision. As he watched in stupefied wonder, lights came on across the city, to dispel the twilight duskiness. Even these were unspeakably beautiful: not the flickering, guttering jaundice light of oil-dipped torches, but a kind of illumination he had never seen before. White luminescence tinged with rainbow hues, like drops of moonlight distilled and captured in beautifully shaped lamps, illuminating the great sprawling city and turning it into the aspect of a giant oyster, opening slowly to reveal an unimaginable treasure trove of pearls. As the lights came on across Lanka, he held his breath. It seemed something far greater than a city. A jewel box, perhaps, fit for a goddess on her wedding night.
He concentrated his senses, attuning them more finely than was possible by normal means. Granting himself the power to see, smell, hear, sense so acutely that he might as well have been there, in the heart of the city itself, walking about among the lakhs of rakshasas that inhabited Lanka like an invisible surveyor.
The moon, visible in the fading dusky light, seemed a part of the city itself, another proud ornament in this resplendent display. Somehow, he sensed, the ethereal illumination that provided light to the city was derived through some magical process from the lustre of the moon itself. As the light of the celestial orb fell upon the parts of the metropolis that sunlight had abandoned, the lamps that hung from every mansion and dwelling captured its silvery luminescence and trapped it within their bellies.
The awakening of these moonlit jewel-like sconces made everything seem even more splendid and breathtaking. It reminded Hanuman of a night when he had followed a dying great tusker for two days and a night, and after a winding, tortuous journey through the most remote reaches of the redmist ranges, he had finally watched the great jumbo reach a secret spot, tumble to its knees and lay itself down in a graveyard of dead elephants. He had gazed with awe and reverence upon that legendary spot. The gleaming pile of ivory in that secret place had formed an intricate pattern of its own over the centuries, perhaps even millennia; a pattern that resembled a white maze that glowed from within in the sacred illumination of the moonlight, as if marking the pathway to another realm. He had imagined that it was exactly that: a pathway for the souls of dead elephants to travel to the next life. It was a moment that had remained with him forever.
But to see a place made and designed and constructed by living hands—by rakshasas, no less!—that evoked the same emotion within his breast was confusing and maddening.
His omniscient eyes flickered this way, then that, seeing, drinking in, barely able to accept the evidence of his senses. He could hear music now, sweet music, wafting on the air. He could hear laughter and conversation, love-making and childplay. Carousing went on in those countless mansions and buildings. Chariots rode the avenues, driven by richly clad rakshasas, both male and female. Palanquins bore veiled rakshasi women to and from secret trysts and public appointments. Everywhere he looked, he saw only beauty and luxury. Even the clothes and jewels that draped the bodies of the denizens were scintillating. Far from the ugly and deformed brutish aspects of most rakshasas he had seen or heard of, almost every single individual he saw was handsomely made in form and face. Some were extraordinary, gifted with divine beauty. He found himself barely able to tear his gaze away from a beauty who watched from an overhead balcony, her body naked for all to see, biting daintily into a blood-red apple, available to any who wished to come and enjoy her embrace.
There was ugliness too, here. For rakshasas were not formed in the likeness of vanars or even mortals. They were horned and tusked, pig-faced and wolf-snouted, carapaced and chitinous, ichor-oozing and slime-trailing. But somehow, in this place, their natural habitat—if one could term a city as natural—even the ugliest specimens seemed to find a place in the larger scheme of things. Just as even the most hideous creeping insect seems vile when perched upon one’s leg or arm, but perfectly suited to its natural environment, so now the vilest looking rakshasas seemed to be an essential part of the great beauty of Lanka. What was more, seen thus in their home setting, even their hideous aspect, so distasteful when compared to the smoother lines and limbs of mortals or vanars, seemed almost attractive. Beautiful, even. Even the most repellent rhinoceros appears perfect when seen with his mate and young ones in the secret, dappled glades of the deep forest.
So it was to Hanuman’s empowered gaze that even the natural ugliness of Lanka seemed wholly natural, a welcome counterpoint to the exquisite beauty that was everywhere and would have been overwhelming without some balance. And he was impressed and awed by this observation.
There were angry debates and drunken brawls. Rants and raves. Bold accusations and even bolder denials. Gruff laughter and raucous parties. He smelled the odours of rakshasi women anointing themselves with unguents and cosmetic enhancements. Despite the legends painting rakshasas as unpitying black-hearted demons, he saw now that here were many shades to the race. Just as the worth of a jewel could not be judged by any one facet alone, but by appraising all its facets, so also the rakshasa nation was a multifaceted entity, replete with all the hues and variances that nature provided all her children. He heard mantras chanted and shlokas recited, by pious rakshasas, and smelled the ghee sizzling in the sacrificial fires. He focussed his potent vision on different places across the city, seeking out individuals at random, and saw rakshasas strikingly handsome as well as hideously ugly, virtuous-ac
ting and rowdy brutes. Love-making and carousing, fornicating and fighting. Women illuminated by their own beauty, nestled in their lovers’ arms. Pairs and groups on terraces of splended mansions, enjoying the moonlight and each other’s company. Women whose feet tinkled delicately as they walked, or ran, or danced. Rakshasas with skin the colour of molten gold, others with skin like moonlight. Many alone. Many reclining in their homes and contemplating, studying sacred texts, or uttering profane words to their spouses or companions.
None of them were Sita.
He looked high and low, seeking with the aid of his heightened senses. He scanned hundreds and hundreds of rakshasi women, moon-bright faces, sun-glowing countenances, eyes with lashes that curled like butterflies, neck ornaments that shimmered like garlands of lightning, women whose eyes glowed like black pearls, twinkled like the sun in eclipse sprinkled with motes of gold, clad in tiger and lion skins, naked and resplendent, beautiful and alluring, dangerous and desirable. He scoured the inner rooms and private chambers, seeking, probing, searching out. He saw sights of unimaginable couplings that would have aroused the most debauched bachelor. Scenes of heartbreaking romance and tenderness that evoked a desire to join in, become part of that family, that very moment. Sights of friendship and brotherhood, the exchanging of vows and the taking of blood-oaths, the sharing of sisters’ secrets, the betraying of marital bonds, the spurning of proposals and the acceptance of invitations. He saw scenes of majestic grandeur as nobility paraded its wealth and power, and scenes of unspeakable degradation and domination. Submission and capitulation. Brutality and remorse. Virtuosity and virtuousness. Purity and high-mindedness. Intellectual debate and foul abuses. He scanned the faces of thousands upon thousands of women, moonbright faces, eyes with great curling lashes, breasts decorated with ornaments that glittered like princely prizes. Heard sweet voices and smelled sweeter perfumes. Guttural accents and gutter-worthy lewdness. Tears and tenderness. Profanity and prudishness.
RAMAYANA Part 3_PRINCE AT WAR Page 31